In this communication age, content providers are increasingly investigating ways in which to provide more content to users as well as interfacing with a larger group of users. The latest communications systems use digital broadcast satellites to broadcast information to users.
In addition to satellites, stratospheric platforms are currently under development. Stratospheric platforms may be unmanned vehicles that can fly for several months at a height of about 60,000 feet such as a solar powered electric plane that is modular in design and may be configured to carry a variety of payloads. Stratospheric platforms have numerous advantages over geostationary satellites, including that a large bandwidth density can be projected over a small but populated area, associated transmission delays are significantly reduced, the power required for transmitting and receiving is substantially smaller, and the user elevation are higher in general. Also, these stratospheric platforms can be deployed relatively rapidly compared to satellites and thus, if a business need increases, the system capability may be increased quickly through deploying new platforms.
Commonly, such communication systems have a high altitude communications device such as a satellite or a stratospheric platform as described above. Also, such systems have user terminals and a gateway station or plurality of gateway stations that communicate with the high altitude communications device and link the user terminals to terrestrial networks.
Because the frequency resources are scarce for over-air transmissions, various multiplexing schemes are used to provide a greater number of communication signals within an allocated communication ban. Such schemes include code division multiple access (“CDMA”), time division multiple access (“TDMA”), frequency division multiple access (“FDMA”), or combinations of these schemes. In addition to the multiplexing schemes, various polarizations may be used to increase system resources.
In a fixed cell structure, beams having different system resources such as frequencies or polarizations are directed to fixed cell. However, due to the antenna structure and the nature of a beam, side lobes from the beam may interfere with communications in cells having the same communication characteristic such as frequency and polarization. To reduce side lobes and achieve a high peak antenna directivity and low side lobes, the antenna aperture is commonly enlarged. A tradeoff may occur if the antenna aperture size is fixed and thus the side lobe characteristic may be sacrificed for a lower main lobe directivity. The drawback to a large aperture is the higher payload mass associated therewith. A low main lobe to side lobe ratio also implies a reduce number of users of the system.
It is typically a goal of communication system designers to reduce mass and increase the number of potential users without increasing the mass or size of the system. It would therefore be desirable to meet these goals without increasing interference between beams.